Bandwidth Sharing with Heterogeneous Service Requirements

We consider a system with two heterogeneous traffic classes. The users from both classes randomly generate service requests, one class having light-tailed properties, the other one exhibiting heavy-tailed characteristics. The heterogeneity in service requirements reflects the extreme variability in flow sizes observed in the Internet, with a vast majority of small transfers (‘mice’) and a limited number of exceptionally large flows (‘elephants’). The active traffic flows share the available bandwidth in a Processor-Sharing (PS) fashion. The PS discipline has emerged as a natural paradigm for modeling the flow-level performance of bandwidth-sharing protocols like TCP. The number of simultaneously active traffic flows is limited by a threshold on the maximum system occupancy. We obtain the exact asymptotics of the transfer delays incurred by the users from the light-tailed class. The results show that the threshold mechanism significantly reduces the detrimental performance impact of the heavy-tailed class. 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: 60K25 (primary), 68M20, 90B18, 90B22 (secondary)